Benignly
blinking through thick-lensed
spectacles [Joe Slovo], this
grey-haired Communist veteran,
folded his hands across his ample
waist and listened, occasionally
shutting his eyes against the TV
lights' glare -- the lids closing
upwards like the eyes of a
benevolent
toad.

I DRIVE over to the engineer
in Langley and give him a £250 cash advance
on the engine repair to our van. The "Pigmobile"
(Jessica's name for it) looks very sorry, but
not as sorry as the engineer.

He is having difficulty getting the right
replacement engine, he says. One piston rod has
actually poked a hole out of the engine casing,
which is why it screeched to a halt. "Use a rag
next time," he lectures me, showing me the
filthy oil pump he has disembowelled from the
Peugeot's entrails, "not paper kitchen towel." I
should not have driven on when it started
clattering, he adds. Right, I won't next
time.

I SEE that David Milliband, our schoolboy
foreign secretary, has got into hot water
by
equivocating, in an interview broadcast by the
BBC, on terrorism. Like Orwell's Napoleon
the Pig who defined in Animal Farm that two legs
was bad, four legs good, Milliband has decided
that terrorism is permissible if it is directed
against law abiding White governments, like the
government that guided South Africa to
prosperity in its pre-Mandela years. That is a
dangerous precept.

Milliband (above) was born in Brussels
of Polish-Jewish émigré parents.
His father, the Marxist dialectician Adolf
Milliband, had fled the Jewish ghetto in
Warsaw; his grandfather Schmuel Milliband
had fought for the Red Army; this rootless
family had fled again, this time from Belgium,
as Adolf Hitler's army moved into the country in
1940; and the Milliband ménage managed to
catch a boat to England, entering the country as
illegal immigrants. As Adolf was not a
popular name in England, his father changed it
to Ralph. Yes, but Milliband?

Thus not even a Nanoband had to face the
dilemma which faced the Polish resistance
against the Nazis; terror, or no terror? These
resistance fighters, called terrorists by the
Germans, would nowadays be called insurgents by
the Coalition of the Good, and were presumably
anyway okay by David Milliband.

They were terrorists nonetheless. Allied
(CCS) documents show that they decided it was a
jolly good idea to spread typhus bacteria
against the German soldiers; they failed to
appreciate, in their less than infinite wisdom,
that bacteria are blind -- they are poor
respecters of race or uniform, let alone
religion, and indeed kill all indiscriminately:
the wartime typhus epidemic rampaged out of
control across eastern Europe thereafter and
many a Jew did not live to tell the tale.

In the BBC interview Foreign Secretary
Milliband was
moist-eyed about his own brief encounter with a
terrorist leader, the notorious and
thoroughly nasty Lithuanian Jew Joe
Slovo, who directed terror operations
against the White and Black South Africans
throughout the 1980s. Slovo called unannounced
one evening at the Millband refugee household in
London for a chat with Adolf, sorry,
Ralph, and young David opened the door to
him.

JOE SLOVO (above) was born in that
same fertile corner of Lithuania which spawned
other violent Jews, including Menachem Begin, or
was it another of that ilk?

Even that mild sentence got me into trouble
years later, although I had made no reference to
Slovo's origins. "A viciously anti-Semitic
description," one Canadian broadcaster rebuked
me, without really thinking what he was saying:
because he was stereotyping, not I.

Two years before the meeting, in 1984, Mr
Slovo had been appointed to lead Umkhonto we
Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed
military wing of the ANC, which had been formed
in alliance with the South African Communist
Party (SACP).

In
the evening J [a South African
diplomat] arrived to collect American
"lobby specialist" D DeK. to spend the
evening viewing two SAP [South African
Police] videos at the home of A., about
ten kilometres from here; her three or four
yappy dogs bothered us all evening. Good supper, although
appetite had suffered from the actual content
of the videos: watched one, rubber stamped
VIDEO
EINHEID SOWETO,
and numbered 18 (the other was 5). The video
lasted 90 minutes; it was a rough compilation
of South African police videos, confiscated
commercial TV reporters' video footage, etc.,
and included the most gruesome scenes I have
ever witnessed: the very unedited nature of
the footage added authenticity. There were police shots of
mass UDF [a Leftwing Liberal Black
Party] demonstrations, the marshals being
visible in their yellow T-shirts; the mobs
jogging, dancing, ululating, whirling all the
time, swirling past impassive police troops
and soldiers, standing with arms akimbo,
motionless although outnumbered perhaps 100
to 1; then a small group chases a Black,
catches him, [filmed] in close up --
perhaps ten feet from the camera -- beats him
to the ground, hacks him apart and stabs him
with a dagger until he is dead. A Black woman is necklaced
[with barbed wire and a rubber tyre
soaked in diesel fuel], her back to us,
kneeling on the ground; she sways, the Blacks
kick her, her arms are pinioned behind her
with barbed wire; as she reels under the
kicks she tries to pull her skirt down at the
back with one pinioned hand. [... She is
then brutally killed]. Viewed from the police
Casspir (armoured truck), we see firebombs
thrown from houses at us, the troops race in
amongst the shanties, we follow with the
camera in time to find an eight year old
Black boy dying, shot, on the floor of his
hut (the Afrikaans voices repeated that he
was the one who threw the petrol bombs.) The video is terrifying to
watch, particularly the blood lust of the
frenzied Black mobs, chanting Zulu war songs,
calling the name of Oliver Tambo; there is
video footage of Winnie Mandela, eyes glazed
(she is an alcoholic), speaking to a mass
audience, proclaiming, "With our necklaces
we shall liberate!" or words to that
effect. This and the other SAP
video are from the classified video library
of the authorities here. They have the
feeling that it would not be conducive to
S.A. 's good to show them in public (South
African television has never shown scenes of
anything like such violence or intimidation.)
It is very worrying, and I am convinced that
Pretoria is wrong: the footage must be shown,
if I can persuade Jae to make it available. A
long argument develops, she is very reluctant
indeed, having been loaned the material in
her official capacity to show to Military
Intelligence, not to D. and myself.

...
I go to bed around midnight, fearful of
nightmares.

Like Mandela, Slovo made no distinction as to
colour; which meant that most of his victims
were Blacks.

Terrorism has always had its unwholesome
supporters. Another was our own well-respected
(now ex-) minister Peter Hain, who was
photographed weeping at the graveside of a South
African terrorist whose bomb had killed or
maimed little girls and other innocents in
Pretoria's railroad station. That photo was
taken years before Hain came to prominence for
reasons both valid and false -- like the absurd,
totally absurd, allegation that he had been
positively identified robbing a bank in Putney
High Street, which was probably his lowest
point.

As said, unthinkable and totally absurd. Even
I, at my most impoverished, have never stooped
to robbing banks: on the contrary, it is they
who systematically rob us.

Somebody comments to me: Throughout the BBC
interview, no doubt in polite deference to
Milliband's family origins, two terrorist
organisations were NOT
cited - the Irgun Zvei Leumi, and the Stern
Gang. So no surprises there.

There's a blue commemorative plaque on the
outside of Joe Slovo's former home, a run-down
house on a busy street in Campden. It is only
about five minutes' walk from another Blue
Plaque-adorned house, dedicated to the writer
George Orwell. I wonder if their ghosts
ever meet and clash beyond the mildewed
skirtings of this strange city,
London.

Spreading the word about ANC terror campaign:
David Irving, Press Release, Nov 23, 1987:
AUTHOR
SMUGGLES POLICE TERROR FILM OUT OF
AFRICA"....returned
from South Africa this morning Monday with
sharp criticism of Sir Richard Attenborough's
film "Cry Freedom," and more: gruesome secret
film footage shot (or confiscated) by the
South African police and army during
counter-insurgency operations in the cities
and Black townships last year."

The Polish bacteria weapon: see
David Irving: Hitler's War, Germany 1939-45,
ch 26:
"the four-room house harbored not only the
usual quantities of explosives and
detonators, but also "three flasks of typhus
bacilli, seventeen sealed rubber tubes
presumably containing bacteria , and one
fountain pen with instructions for use for
spreading bacteria"; captured documents
revealed that twenty pounds of arsenic had
also passed through the house.